PR 5533 
.113 
Copy 1 



JOHN M. SYNGE: A FEW PERSONAL 
RECOLLECTIONS 



Five hundred copies of this 
book have been printed. 
This copy is No. 




JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE 



JOHN M. SYNGE: A FEW 
PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 
WITH BIOGRAPHICAL 
NOTES BY JOHN MASEFIELD 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK-MCMXV 



:33 



M3 



Copyright, 1915 
By JOHN MASEFIELD 



Published July, 1915 






JUL 22 1915 
©CL A 4 06842 



JOHN M. SYNGE: A FEW PERSONAL 
RECOLLECTIONS 



IT 



JOHN M. SYNGE 

FIRST met John M. Synge at the 
room of a common friend, up two 
pairs of stairs, in an old house in 
Bloomsbury, on a Monday night 
of January, 1903. When I entered 
the room, he was sitting in a 
rush-bottomed chair, talking to a young man 
just down from Oxford. My host introduced me, 
with the remark that he wanted us to know 
each other. 

Synge stood up to shake hands with me. He was 
of the middle height, about five feet eight or 
nine. My first impression of him was of a dark, 
grave face, with a great deal in it, changing from 
the liveliness of conversation to a gravity of 
scrutiny. After we had shaken hands, I passed 
to the other end of the room to greet other 
friends. We did not speak to each other again 
that night. 

When I sat at the other end of the room my 
chair was opposite Synge's chair. Whenever I 
raised my eyes I saw him, and wondered who 
he could be. Disordered people look disordered, 
unusual people look unusual. A youth with long 
hair, a velvet coat, extravagant manners, and 
the other effeminacies of emptiness looks the 

[7] 



John M. Synge : 

charlatan he is. Synge gave one from the first 
the impression of a strange personality. He was 
of a dark type of Irishman, though not black- 
haired. Something in his air gave one the fancy 
that his face was dark from gravity. Gravity 
filled the face and haunted it, as though the man 
behind were forever listening to life's case be- 
fore passing judgment. It was "(a dark, grave 
face, with a great deal in itjf* The hair was worn 
neither short nor long. The moustache was 
rather thick and heavy. The lower jaw, other- 
wise clean-shaven, was made remarkable by 
a tuft of hair, too small to be called a goatee, 
upon the lower lip. The head was of a good size. 
There was nothing niggardly, nothing abundant 
about it. The face was pale, the cheeks were 
rather drawn. In my memory they were rather 
seamed and old-looking. The eyes were at once 
smoky and kindling. The mouth, not well seen 
below the moustache, had a great play of hu- 
mour on it. But for this humorous mouth, the 
kindling in the eyes, and something not robust 
in his build, he would have been more like a 
Scotchman than an Irishman. 
I remember wondering if he were Irish. His 
voice, very guttural and quick, with a kind of 
lively bitterness in it, was of a kind of Irish voice 

. [8] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

new to me at that time. I had known a good many 
Irish people ; but they had all been vivacious and 
picturesque, rapid in intellectual argument, and 
vague about life. There was nothing vivacious, 
picturesque, rapid or vague about Synge. The 
rush-bottomed chair next to him was filled by 
talker after talker, but Synge was not talking, he 
was answering. When someone spoke to him he 
answered with the grave Irish courtesy. He 
offered nothing of his own. When the talk be- 
came general he was silent. Sometimes he went 
to a reddish earthenware pot upon the table, took 
out a cigarette and lit it at a candle. Then he 
sat smoking, pushed back a little from the circle, 
gravely watching. Sometimes I heard his deep, 
grave voice assenting " Ye-es, ye-es," with med- 
itative boredom. Sometimes his little finger 
flicked off the ash on to the floor. His manner was 
that of a man too much interested in the life about 
him to wish to be more than a spectator. His in- 
terest was in life, not in ideas. He was new to 
that particular kind of life. Afterwards, when I 
had come to know him, I heard him sum up every 
person there with extraordinary point and sparkle. 
Often since then, eager to hear more of my friend, 
I have asked men who met him casually for a re- 
port of him. So often they have said, " He was a 

[9] 



John M. Synge : 

looker-on at life. He came in and sat down and 
looked on. He gave nothing in return. He never 
talked, he only listened. I never got much out of 
him. I never got to the real Synge. I was never 
conscious of what he felt. Sometimes I felt that 
there was nothing in him. I never knew him re- 
spond. I never knew him do or say anything to 
suggest what he was in himself." When I hear 
these phrases, I know that those who utter them 
really met Synge. His place was outside the circle, 
gravely watching, gravely summing up, with a 
brilliant malice, the fools and wise ones inside. 
A week, or perhaps a fortnight, later, I met him 
again at the same place, among the same people. 
He was talking brightly and charmingly to a 
woman. Men usually talk their best to women. 
When I turn over my memories of him, it seems 
that his grave courtesy was only gay when he 
was talking to women. His talk to women had a 
lightness and charm. It was sympathetic; never 
self-assertive, as the hard, brilliant Irish intellect 
so often is. He liked people to talk to him. He 
liked to know the colours of people's minds. He 
liked to be amused. His merriest talk was like 
playing catch with an apple of banter, which one 
afterwards ate and forgot. 
He never tried to be brilliant. I never heard him 

[10] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

say a brilliant thing. He said shrewd things. I do 
not know what he could have done if stirred to 
talk. Few people born out of old, sunny countries 
talk well. I never heard him engaged with a bril- 
liant talker, either man or Woman. He told me 
that once, in Paris, he had gone to hear a brilliant 
talker — a French poet, now dead. It was like him 
that he did not speak to the talker. " We sat round 
on chairs and the great man talked." 
During the evening, I spoke a few words to Synge 
about some Irish matter. We pushed back our 
chairs out of the circle and discussed it. I did not 
know at that time that he was a writer. I knew by 
name most of the writers in the Irish movement. 
Synge was not one of the names. I thought that he 
must be at work on the political side. I wronged 
him in this. He never played any part in politics : 
politics did not interest him. He was the only 
Irishman I have ever met who cared nothing for 
either the political or the religious issue. He had a 
prejudice against one Orange district, because the 
people in it were dour. He had a prejudice 
against one Roman Catholic district, because the 
people in it were rude. Otherwise his mind was 
untroubled. Life was what interested him. He 
would have watched a political or religious riot 
with gravity, with pleasure in the spectacle, and 

[11] 



John M. Synge : 

malice for the folly. He would have taken no side, 
and felt no emotion, except a sort of pity when the 
losers could go on no longer. The question was 
nothing to him. All that he asked for was to hear 
what it made people say and to see what it made 
people do. 

Towards one in the morning, our host asked 
Synge and me to sup with him. We foraged in 
the pantry, and found some eggs, but nothing in 
which to cook them. Our host said that he would 
try a new trick, of boiling eggs in a paper box. We 
were scornful about it, thinking it impossible. He 
brought out paper, made a box (with some diffi- 
culty), filled it with water, and boiled an egg in it. 
Synge watched the task with the most keen in- 
terest. " You've done it," he said. " I never 
thought you would." Afterwards he examined the 
paper box. I suppose he planned to make one in 
Aran in the summer. While we supped, our host 
chaffed us both for choosing to eat cold meats 
when we might have had nice hot eggs. It was at 
this supper that I first came to know the man. 
When we got into the street, we found that we 
lodged within a few minutes' walk of each other. 
We walked together to our lodgings. He said that 
he had been for a time in Aran, that he had taken 
some photographs there, and that he would be 

[12] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

pleased to show them to me, if I would call upon 
him later in the morning. He said that he had just 
come to London from Paris, and that he found 
Bloomsbury strange after the Quartier Latin. He 
was puzzled by the talk of the clever young men 
from Oxford. " That's a queer way to talk. They 
all talk like that. I wonder what makes them talk 
like .that? I suppose they're always stewing over 
dead things." 

Synge lodged in a front room on the second floor 
of No. 4, Handel Street, Bloomsbury. It was a 
quiet house in a quiet, out-of-the-way street. His 
room there was always very clean and tidy. The 
people made him very comfortable. Afterwards, 
in 1907, during his last visit to London, he lodged 
there again, in the same room. I called upon him 
there in the afternoon of the day on which I last 
saw him. 

When I first called upon him, I found him at his 
type-writer, hard at work. He was making a fair 
copy of one of his two early one-act plays, then 
just finished. His type-writer was a small portable 
machine of the Blick variety. He was the only 
writer I have ever known who composed direct 
upon a type-writing machine. I have often seen 
him at work upon it. Sometimes, when I called to 
ask him to come for a walk, he had matter to 

[13] 



John M. Synge : 

finish off before we could start. He worked rather 
slowly and very carefully, sitting very upright. He 
composed slowly. He wrote and re-wrote his plays 
many times. I remember that on this first occasion 
the table had a pile of type-written drafts upon it, 
as well as a few books, one or two of them by M. 
Pierre Loti. He thought M. Loti the best living 
writer of prose. There are marks of M. Loti's in- 
fluence in the Aran book. Much of the Aran 
manuscript was on the table at that time. Synge 
asked me to wait for a few minutes while he 
finished the draft at which he was working. He 
handed me a black tobacco-pouch and a packet of 
cigarette-papers. While I rolled a cigarette he 
searched for his photographs and at last handed 
them to me. I'hey were quarter-plate prints in a 
thick bundle. There must have been fifty of them. 
They were all of the daily life of Aran; women 
carrying kelp, men in hookers, old people at their 
doors, a crowd at the landing-place, men loading 
horses, people of vivid character, pigs and chil- 
dren playing together, etc. As I looked at them he 
explained them or commented on them in a way 
which made all sharp and bright. His talk was 
best when it was about life or the ways of life. His 
mind was too busy with tjie life to be busy with 
the affairs or the criticism of life. His talk was all 

[14] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

about men and women and what they did and 
what they said when life excited them. His mind 
was perhaps a little like Shakespeare's. We do not 
know what Shakespeare thought: I do not know 
what Synge thought. I don't believe anybody 
knew, or thinks he knows. 
" There was something very nice about Synge." 
The friend who said this to me, added that 
" though the plays are cynical, he was not cynical 
in himself." I do not feel that the plays are cyn- 
ical. They seem heartless at first sight. The abun- 
dant malicious zest in them gives them an air of 
cruelty. But in the plays, Synge did with his per- 
sonality as he did in daily life. He buried his 
meaning deep. He covered his tragedy with 
mockeries. 

More than a year ago a friend asked me what sort 
of man Synge was. I answered, " a perfect com- 
panion." The other day I saw that another friend, 
who knew him better than I, had described him 
as " the best companion." After that first day, 
when I called upon him at his room, we met fre- 
quently. We walked long miles together, generally 
from Bloomsbury to the river, along the river to 
Vauxhall, and back by Westminster to Soho. We 
sometimes dined together at a little French res- 
taurant, called the Restaurant des Gourmets. The 

[15] 



John M. Synge : 

house still stands; but it has now grown to five 
times the size. The place where Synge and I 
used to sit has now been improved away. We 
spent happy hours there, talking, rolling cig- 
arettes, and watching the life. " Those were great 
days," he used to say. He was the best compan- 
ion for that kind of day. 

Our talk was always about life. When we talked 
about writers (modern French and ancient Eng- 
lish writers) it was not about their writings that 
we talked, but about the something kindling in 
them, which never got expressed. His theory of 
writing was this : — " No good writer can ever be 
translated." He used to quote triumphantly from 
Shakespeare's 130th Sonnet. 

" As any she belied with false compare." 

" How would you put that into French? " he 

asked. 

He never talked about himself. He often talked 

of his affairs, his money, his little room in Paris, 

his meetings with odd characters, etc., but never 

of himself. He had wandered over a lot of Europe. 

He was silent about all that. 

Very rarely, and then by chance, when telling of 

the life in Aran, or of some strange man in the 

[16] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

train or in the steamer, he revealed little things 
about himself : — 

" They asked me to fiddle to them, so that they 
might dance." 
"Do you play, then? " 

" I fiddle a little. I try to learn something different 
for them every time. The last time I learned to do 
conjuring tricks. They'd get tired of me if I didn't 
bring something new. I'm thinking of learning the 
penny whistle before I go again." 
I never heard him mention his early life nor what 
he endured in his struggles to find a form. I be- 
lieve he never spoke about his writings, except to 
say that he wrote them slowly, many times over. 
His talk was always about vivid, picturesque, 
wild life. He took greater joy in what some frantic 
soul from Joyce's country said when the police- 
man hit him than in anything of his own. He 
found no vivid life in England. He disliked Eng- 
land. I think he only knew London. Afterwards he 
stayed for a couple of weeks in Devonshire. Lon- 
don is a place where money can be made and 
spent. Devonshire is a place where elderly ladies 
invite retired naval officers to tea. England lies 
further to the north. He was never in any part of 
England where the country life is vigorous and 
picturesque. He believed England to be all sub- 

[17] 



John M. Synge : 

urb, like the " six countries overhung with 
smoke." Soon after our first meeting I was pres- 
ent at his first success. His two early plays, 
" Riders to the Sea " and " The Shadow of the 
Glen," were read aloud to about a dozen friends 
at the rooms of one who was always most gen- 
erously helpful to writers not yet sure of their 
road. A lady read the plays very beautifully. After- 
wards we all applauded. Synge learned his metier 
that night. Until then, all his work had been ten- 
tative and in the air. After that, he went forward, 
knowing what he could do. 

For two or three months I met Synge almost daily. 
Presently he went back to Ireland (I believe to 
Aran) and I to " loathed Devonshire." I met him 
again, later in the year. During the next few 
years, though he was not often in town, I met him 
fairly often whenever the Irish players came to 
London. Once I met him for a few days together 
in Dublin. He was to have stayed with me both 
in London and in Ireland; but on both occasions 
his health gave way, and the visit was never paid. 
I remember sitting up talking with him through 
the whole of one winter night (in 1904). Later, 
when the Rokeby Velasquez was being talked of, 
I went with him to see the picture. We agreed 
that it was the kind of picture people paint when 

[18] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

mind is beginning to get languid. After we had 
seen the picture I walked with him to his hotel 
(the Kenilworth Hotel), talking about Irish art, 
which he thought was the kind of art people make 
when mind has been languid for a long time. I 
never saw him angry. I never saw him vexed. I 
never heard him utter a hasty or an unkind word. 
I-saw him visibly moved once to sadness, when 
some one told him how tourists had spoiled the 
country people in a part of Ireland. The Irish 
country people are simple and charming. Tourists 
make them servile, insolent, and base. " The 
Irish are easily corrupted," he said, " because 
they are so simple. When they're corrupted, 
they're hard, they're rude, they're everything 
that's bad. But they're only that where the low- 
class tourists go, from America, and Glasgow, and 
Liverpool and these places." He seldom praised 
people, either for their work or for their personal- 
ity. When he spoke of acquaintances he generally 
quoted a third person. When he uttered a per- 
sonal judgment it was always short, like " He's a 
great fellow," or " He's a grand fellow," or " No- 
body in Ireland understands how big he is." 
On one occasion (I think in 1906) we lunched to- 
gether (at the Vienna Cafe.) He told me with huge 
delight about his adventures in the wilds. He had 

[19] 



John M. Synge : 

lodged in a cabin far from the common roads. 
There was no basin in his bed-room. He asked 
for one, so that he might wash. The people 
brought him a wooden box, worn smooth with 
much use. In the morning he was roused by his 
host with the cry, " Have you washed yourself 
yet? Herself is wanting the box to make up the 
bread in." 

I remember asking him what sensations an au- 
thor had when his play was being performed for 
the first time. " I sit still in my box," he said, " and 
curse the actors." He was in a very gay mood 
that afternoon, though his health was fast failing. 
He spoke with his usual merry malice about his 
throat. With the trouble in his throat he could not 
tell when he would be in England again. He was 
only in England once more. That was in late May 
or early June, 1907, when the Irish players gave 
a few performances at the Kingsway Theatre. I 
met him in the foyer of the theatre just before 
the first London performance of " The Playboy of 
the Western World." I had some talk with him 
then. During the performance I saw him in his 
box, " sitting still," as he said, watching with the 
singular grave intensity with which he watched 
life. It struck me then that he was the only person 
there sufficiently simple to be really interested in 

[20] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

living people ; and that it was this simplicity which 
gave him his charm. He found the life in a man 
very well worth wonder, even though the man 
were a fool, or a knave, or just down from Oxford. 
At the end of the play I saw him standing in his 
box, gravely watching the actors as the curtain 
rose and again rose during the applause. Pres- 
ently he turned away to speak to the lady who had 
read his plays on the night of his first success. The 
play was loudly applauded. Some people behind 
me — a youth and a girl — began to hiss. I remem- 
ber thinking that they resembled the bird they 
imitated. I only saw Synge on two other occasions. 
I met him at a dinner party, but had no talk with 
him, and I called upon him at his old lodgings in 
Handel Street. He said: — 
" Doesn't it seem queer to you to be coming back 
here? " 

" It seems only the other day that we were 
here." 

" Those were great days." 
" I wish we could have them again." 
" Ah," he said, laughing his hard laugh, half a 
cough, 

" Nature brings not back the mastodon, 
Nor we those times." 

[21] 



John M. Synge : 

Presently he told me that he had been writing 
poetry. He handed me a type-written copy of a 
ballad, and asked me what I thought of it. I told 
him that I felt the want of an explanatory stanza 
near the beginning. " Yes," he said. " But I can't 
take your advice, because then it would not be 
quite my own." He told me the wild picturesque 
story (of a murder in Connaught) which had in- 
spired the ballad. His relish of the savagery made 
me feel that he was a dying man clutching at life, 
^> and clutching most wildly at violent life, as the 
sick man does. We went out shortly afterwards, 
and got into a cab, and drove to the Gourmets, 
and ate our last meal together. He was going to 
the theatre after dinner; I had to go out of town. 
After dinner we got into another cab. He said he 
would give me a lift towards my station. We drove 
together along the Strand, talking of the great 
times we would have and of the jolly times we had 
had. None of our many talks together was happier 
than the last. I felt in my heart as we drove that I 
should never see him again. Our last talk to- 
gether was to be a happy one. 
He was later than he thought. He could not come 
all the way to my station. He had to turn off to his 
theatre. 
At the top of Fleet Street hill we shook hands and 

[22] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

said " So long " to each other. The cab drew 
up just outside the office of a sporting news- 
paper. I got out, and raised my hand to him. He 
raised his in his grave way. The cab swung 
round and set off westwards, and that was the 
end. 

When I heard of his death I felt that his interest 
in life would soon get itself into another body, and 
come here again to look on and listen. When a 
life ends, it is a sign that Nature's purpose in that 
life is over. When a personality has passed from us 
it is a sign that life has no further need of it. What 
that personality did may matter. What that per- 
sonality was does not matter. Man's task is to 
leave the dead alone. Life would be finer if we did 
not drag that caddisworm's house of the past be- 
hind us. 

I have not set down all my memories of him. 
Much of what he told and said to me was told and 
said in the confidence of friendship. I have set 
down only a few odd fragments to show those who 
care to know what sort of a man he was. Lies and 
lives will be written of him; plenty of both. 
Enough should be said to defeat the malice and 
stupidity of detractors. Those who want to know 
what he was in himself should read the poems. 
The poems are the man speaking. They are so 

[23] 



John M. Synge: 

like him that to read them is to hear him. The 
couplet — 

" But they are rotten (I ask their pardon,) 
And we've the sun on rock and garden." 

gives me, whenever I read it, the feeling that he is 
in the room, looking up with his hard, quick gut- 
tural laugh and kindling eyes, from the rolling of 
a cigarette. The issue of " Samhain " for Decem- 
ber, 1904, contains a portrait of him by Mr. J. B. 
Yeats. It is difficult to believe that there can be 
any portrait more like him. 



I wrote down these memories in January and 
February, 1911, two years after Synge's death, 
and three and a half years after I had parted from 
him. They were printed in the " Contemporary 
Review " for April, 1911, and are reprinted here 
through the kindness of the Editor and Propri- 
etors, whom I wish to thank. Four years have 
passed since I wrote this account, and in reading 
it over today one or two little things, as the use of 
particular words in what I quote from him, etc., 
haye made me pause, as possibly inexact. I have 
not altered these things, because, when I wrote 

[24] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

this account, my memory of the events and words 
was sharper than it is today. Memory is a bad 
witness, and inexact in very little things, such as 
the precise words used in talk some years before. 
The reader must however believe that the words 
quoted, if not the very words used by Synge, are 
as near to the very words as my memory can 
make them. 



I have been asked to add to these memories a few 
notes, and the chief dates in Synge's life, as far 
as we know them. His life, like that of any other 
artist, was dated not by events but by sensations. 
I know no more of his significant days than the 
rest of the world, but the known biographical 
facts are these. 

He was born on 16th April, 1871, at Newtown 
Little, near Dublin. He was the youngest son and 
eighth child of John Hatch Synge, barrister, and 
of Kathleen, his wife (born Traill). His father 
died in 1872. His mother in 1908. He went to 
private schools in Dublin and in Bray, but being 
seldom well, left school when about fourteen and 
then studied with a tutor; was fond of wandering 
alone in the country, noticing birds and wild life, 
and later took up music, piano, flute and violin. 

[25] 



John M. Synge : 

All through his youth, he passed his summer hol- 
idays in Annamoe, Co. Wicklow, a strange place, 
which influenced him. 

He entered Trinity College, Dublin, on June 18, 
1888, won prizes in Hebrew and Irish in Trinity 
Term, 1892, and took his B. A. degree (second 
class) in December, 1892. While at Trinity he 
studied music at the Royal Irish Academy of 
Music, where he won a scholarship in Harmony 
and Counterpoint. 

He left College undecided about a career, but 
was inclined to make music his profession. He 
went to Germany (Coblentz and Wiirtzburg) to 
study music; but in 1894, owing to a disappointed 
loye, he gave up this, and went to Paris, with 
some thought of becoming a writer. He was much 
in France for the next few years writing con- 
stantly to little purpose ; he went to Italy in 1896, 
and in May 1898 made his first visit to the Aran 
Islands. During this visit he began the first drafts 
of the studies which afterwards grew to be his 
book, " The Aran Islands." His writings, up to 
this time, had been tentative and imitative, being 
mainly reflections from (and upon) what had 
most struck him in his reading. He had read con- 
siderably in some six languages (Hebrew, Irish, 
German, Italian, French and English), and widely 

[26] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

in at least four of them, besides his scholarship in 
the universal language of music. Among his early 
plans for books were schemes for a translation 
from some of the prose of St. Francis of Assisi 
(which he abandoned, because an English trans- 
lation was published at the time), and for a critical 
study of Racine, whose pure and noble art always 
meant much to him. Some critical and other 
writings of this period exist in manuscript. They 
are said to be carefully written, but wanting in 
inner impulse. 

Throughout this period if not throughout his life 
he lived with the utmost ascetic frugality, border- 
ing always, or touching, on poverty. He used to 
say that his income was " forty pounds a year and 
a new suit of clothes, when my old ones get too 
shabby." He had no expensive habits, he was 
never self-indulgent, he had no wish to entertain 
nor to give away, no desire to make nor to own 
money, no taste for collection nor zest for spend- 
ing. He eschewed all things that threatened his 
complete frugal independence and thereby the 
integrity of his mind. 

The superficial man, not seeing this last point, 
sometimes felt that he " did not know how to 
abound." 



[27] 



John M. Synge : 

When in Paris in 1899, he met Mr. W. B. Yeats 
who, having seen his work suggested that he 
would do well to give up writing criticism, and go 
again to the Aran Islands to study the life there, 
and fill his mind with real and new images, so 
that, if he wrote later, his writing might be lively 
and fresh and his subject a new discovery. He did 
as Mr. Yeats suggested and went back to the 
Aran Islands and passed some weeks in Inish- 
maan. In all, he made five or six visits to the Aran 
Islands, these two of 1898 and 1899, and certainly 
three more in the autumns of 1900, 1901, 1902. 
The Islanders liked him but were a little puzzled 
by him. He was an unassertive, unassuming man, 
with a genius for being inconspicuous. He has 
told us that his usual method in a poor man's 
cabin was to make them forget that he was there, 
but in Aran on these visits he always tried to add 
to the fun and to his personal prestige, with con- 
juring tricks, fiddling, piping, taking photographs, 
etc. Some of the Islanders were much attached to 
him. I suppose that their main impression was 
that he was a linguist who had committed a crime 
somewhere and had come to hide. 
His next three or four years, 1899-1902 were 
passed between Paris and Ireland j Paris in the 
winter and spring and Ireland in the other sea- 

[28] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

sons. He was at work on " The Aran Islands," 
and on his three early one act plays, " The 
Tinker's Wedding," "Riders to the Sea," and "The 
Shadow of the Glen." He came to London in the 
winter of 1902-3, where I saw him as I have de- 
scribed. London did not suit him and he did not 
stay long. He gave up his room in Paris at this 
time, with some searching of the heart; for at 
thirty one clings to youth. After this, he was 
mostly in Ireland, in the wilder West and else- 
where; writing and perfecting. At the end of 1904 
he was in Dublin, for the opening of the Abbey 
Theatre of which he was one of the advisers. In 
June, 1905, he went through the Congested Dis- 
tricts of Connemara, with Mr. Jack B. Yeats. 
After this expedition, which lasted a month, he 
was generally in or near Dublin, in Kingstown and 
elsewhere, though he made summer excursions to 
Dingle, the Blasket Islands, Kerry, etc. About 
once a year, when the Abbey Theatre Company 
was touring in England, he came with it if his 
health allowed, to watch the performances in Lon- 
don, Manchester or Edinburgh, wherever they 
might be. His life was always mainly within him- 
self ; the record of these years is very meagre, all 
that can be said of them is that he passed them 
mostly in Ireland, writing and re-writing, in fail- 

[29] 



John M. Synge : 

ing health and with increasing purpose. His gen- 
eral health was never robust, and for at least the 
last six years of his life his throat troubled him. 
He used to speak of the trouble as " his glands; " 
I cannot learn its exact nature; but I have been 
told that it was " cancer " or " some form of can- 
cer," which caused him " not very great pain," 
but which " would have been excessively painful 
had he lived a little longer." Doctors may be able 
to conclude from these vague statements what it 
was. He was operated upon in May, 1908, but 
the growth could not be removed^ and from that 
time on he was under sentence of death. He 
passed his last few months of life trying to finish 
his play of " Deirdre " and writing some of his 
few poems. He died in a private nursing home in 
Dublin on the 24th March, 1909, and was buried 
two days later in a family vault in the Protestant 
graveyard of Mount Jerome, Harold's Cross, 
Dublin. He had been betrothed, but not married. 

One thing more needs to be said. People have 
stated that Synge's masters in art were the 
writers of the French Decadent' school of the 
eighteen nineties, Verlaine, Mallarme, J. K. 
Huysmans, etc. Synge had read these writers 
(who has not?) I often talked of them with him. 

[30] 



A Few Personal Recollections 

So far as I know, they were the only writers for 
whom he expressed dislike. As a craftsman he 
respected their skill, as an artist he disliked their 
vision. The dislike he plainly stated in a review of 
Huysmans' " La Cathedrale " (" The Speaker," 
April, 1903) and in an allusion to the same au- 
thor's " A Rebours," in one of his Prefaces. I do 
not know who his masters in art may have been, 
that is one of the personal things he would not will- 
ingly have told; but from what I can remember, I 
should say that his favourite author, during the 
greater part of his life, was Racine. 



[31] 



PORTRAITS 

Several portraits of Synge exist. Besides a few 
drawings of him which are still in private hands, 
there are these, which have been made public. 

An oil painting by Mr. J. B. Yeats. R. H. A. (Mu- 
nicipal Gallery, Dublin.) 

A Drawing by Mr. J. B. Yeats. R. H. A. (" Sam- 
hain." December, 1904.) 

A Drawing by Mr. J. B. Yeats. R. H. A. (Frontis- 
piece to " Playboy.") 

Frontispieces to Vols. I. III. and IV. of " The 
Works." (One of these is a drawing by Mr. James 
Paterson, the others are photographs.) 

Two small but characteristic amateur photo- 
graphs reproduced in M. Bourgeois's book. 

Very few people can read a dead man's character 
from a portrait. Life is our concern; it was very 
specially Synge's concern. Doubtless he would 
prefer us not to bother about how he looked, but 
to think of him as one who 

" Held Time's fickle glass his fickle hour " 

and then was put back into the earth with the 
kings and tinkers who made such a pageant in 
his brain. For the rest, he would say, with Shake- 
speare, 

" My spirit is thine, the better part of me." 

[32] 



A LIST OF HIS PLAYS, IN CHRONOLOGICAL 
ORDER WITH THE DATES OF THEIR 
FIRST PERFORMANCES 

The Shadow of the Glen. Written 1902-3. Per- 
formed 8th October 1903. 

Riders to the Sea. Written 1902-3. Performed 
25th February 1904. 

'The Well of the Saints. Written 1903-4. Per- 
formed 4th February 1905. 

The Playboy of the Western World. Written 
1905-6. Performed 26th January 1907. 

The Tinkers Wedding. Written 1902-1907. Per- 
formed 11th November 1909. 

Deirdre of the Sorrows (unfinished), 1907-8. Per- 
formed 13th January 1910. 



[33 



OTHER WRITINGS 

The Aran Islands. Written between 1899 and 

1907. Published April, 1907. 

Poems and Translations. Written between 1891 
and 1908; the translations between 1905 and 

1908. Published June 5, 1909. 

The Works of John M. Synge, in 4 volumes, Pub- 
lished in 1910, contains all the published plays 
and books and selections from his papers. Though 
he disliked writing for newspapers he wrote some 
contributions to " The Gael," " The Shanachie," 
" The Speaker," " The Manchester Guardian " 
and " L'Europeen " (in Paris) between the years 
1902 and 1908. One or two of the best of these are 
reprinted in the "Works." The others may be 
read in their place by those who care. It is pos- 
sible that the zeal of biographers will discover a 
few papers by him in other periodicals. 



[34] 



A NOTE 

Information about John M. Synge may be found 
in Mr. W. B. Yeats's " Collected Works," Vol. 8, 
p. 173. In " J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His 
Time," by W. B. Yeats and Jack B. Yeats. In an 
article by Mr. Jack B. Yeats in the " New York 
Sun," July, 1909, mainly reprinted in the above. 
In " The Manchester Guardian," March 25th 
1909, and, much more fully than elsewhere in 
John M. Synge, by M. Maurice Bourgeois, the 
French authority on Synge, whose book is the 
best extant record of the man's career. A good 
many critical and controversial books and articles 
of varying power and bitterness have appeared 
about him. A short Life of him by myself, was 
published in a supplementary volume of the Dic- 
tionary of National Biography in 1912. The people 
who knew him in Ireland, and some who have 
followed in his tracks there have set down or col- 
lected facts about him. The student will no doubt 
meet with more of these as time goes by. For 
those which have already appeared, the student 
should refer to M. Bourgeois's very carefully com- 
piled appendices, and to the published indices of 
English and American Periodical Publications. 

Printed in the United States of America 
[35] 



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